Workshop on new perspectives on Celtic syntax 7-8 September 2012, University of California, Berkley

Welsh syntactic mutation and Arabic faulty accusative: case or configuration?

Steve Hewitt s.hewitt@unesco.org UNESCO

Abstract
Welsh syntactic mutation, often known as (indefinite) direct object mutation (DOM), after the most commonly affected element, has been the subject of considerable debate among theoretical linguists. It is the main Celtic initial consonant mutation which appears to be controlled from a distance (most other initial consonant mutations in Celtic languages are triggered by some immediately preceding element). Analyses of Welsh syntactic mutation fall broadly into two camps: semantic (case) vs syntactic (configuration), cf. the XP trigger hypothesis (XPTH) (W sangiad interpolation). In Formal Arabic (= Classical Arabic; Modern Standard Arabic), a little-noted and ostensibly incorrect, but strongly persistent phenomenon, faulty (indefinite) accusative, instead of correct indefinite nominative, is strikingly reminiscent of Welsh syntactic mutation (all Arabic examples of faulty indefinite accusative would show syntactic mutation in Welsh) in that it appears to involve some trigger constituent intervening between the head and the dependent affected. Indeed, it may be possible to describe the grammar of accusative-marked elements in Formal Arabic in simpler XP trigger hypothesis terms, not only for faulty indefinite accusatives, but for all accusatives, thus incorporating these erroneous, but persistent constructions fully into a more accurate grammar. Finally, evidence suggests that the two phenomena in both languages may have originally involved semantic case rather than simple syntactic configuration; but the fact that these twin explanations to a very large extent overlap may, diachronically, have promoted a case > configuration reanalysis by native speakers both in Arabic and in Welsh. In other words, both approaches (case/configuration) may be apposite, but the configurational XPTH is probably now more correct for Welsh than the case-marking approach. The Formal Arabic faulty accusative analogue of Welsh syntactic mutation highlights how natural such a rule is cross-linguistically.